No. 6 · D. H. Lawrence
Piano
A woman sings to the speaker in the dusk, and against his will the music carries him back to Sunday evenings at his mother’s piano. He fights the memory, loses, and ends the poem weeping ‘like a child for the past’.
The poem at a glance
Published in 1918, the poem is a study of nostalgia as an ambush. The speaker is a grown man in a sophisticated present, a singer performing for him, a grand ‘black piano appassionato’, yet one song is enough to dissolve it all. The memory it summons is small and domestic: a child under the piano on a winter Sunday, pressing his mother’s feet as she plays and smiles. The drama lies in the struggle, since the speaker does not want to be moved: manhood, dignity and the present all lose to a hymn in a cosy parlour.
Methods that matter
Sound: the music is in the verse
The opening line, ‘Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me’, is thick with sibilance and hush, and the poem keeps scoring its own soundtrack: the ‘boom of the tingling strings’ sets the piano’s deep notes against its bright high ones in two onomatopoeic words. Because the reader hears the music too, we are seduced alongside the speaker: the poem makes us experience the power it describes.
Memory as betrayal and flood
The song works ‘in spite of myself’: its ‘insidious mastery’ ‘betrays’ him back to childhood, the lexis of treachery presenting nostalgia as an enemy agent inside the self. Once the defences fail, the metaphor turns to water: his manhood is ‘cast / Down in the flood of remembrance’, with the enjambment dropping ‘Down’ to the next line so the verse physically falls with him. Emotion here is not chosen but suffered.
Form and structure: three stanzas, one collapse
Three regular quatrains in long, swaying rhyming couplets: present song, remembered parlour, final surrender. The couplets’ gentle rock suits both the singing and the remembered hymns, and the rhyme of ‘clamour’ with ‘glamour’ stages the whole contest in two words: the loud brilliant present against the enchanted past. The last line’s simile, ‘I weep like a child for the past’, completes the structure: the man has become the child he was remembering.
Key quotations
| Quotation | Method | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| ‘Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me’ (l. 1) | Sibilance, intimate address | The hushed s-sounds make the reader lean in: the poem opens as a lullaby, disarming speaker and reader alike. |
| ‘the boom of the tingling strings’ (stanza one) | Onomatopoeia | Low notes and high notes in two words: the remembered piano is more vivid than the real one in front of him. |
| ‘insidious mastery of song / Betrays me back’ (stanza two) | Lexis of treachery, enjambment | Music becomes a seductive traitor: memory is presented as something done to him, against his adult will. |
| ‘my manhood is cast / Down in the flood of remembrance’ (stanza three) | Flood metaphor, enjambment | The line break drops ‘Down’ like the fall it describes: dignity drowns in the rising past. |
| ‘I weep like a child for the past’ (l. 12) | Climactic simile | The final surrender: the simile closes the circle, turning the grown man back into the child under the piano. |
Compare it with…
Poem at Thirty-Nine (the classic pairing): both are adults remembering a parent through the senses, music here, cooking and firelight there, but Walker’s memory settles into loving pride while Lawrence’s ends in helpless tears. It also pairs well on the importance of memory with Half-past Two: in both, an ordinary moment expands until it swallows the present entirely.
Think it through
- Why does the speaker resist the memory so hard? What exactly does he feel he is losing?
- Is the remembered childhood real, or has nostalgia polished it? Does the poem know the difference?
- Two women are in this poem: the singer and the mother. What happens to the singer by the end?
Towards the exam
Practice question: Compare the ways the writers present feelings about parents in Piano and Poem at Thirty-Nine. Plan three integrated comparison points (sound, structure, imagery), write for forty minutes, then take it to the marking desk.